As I've said elsewhere, it's been a real pleasure working closely with the CiviCRM team on the CiviCase project. The work we're doing is exciting, and has at least a hope of offering some efficiency to the large number of service providers whose work is organized into "cases", however that term is locally defined.

Designing for the variety of different potential uses for the case module is quite a challenge. Although the first release of CiviCase has to meet our immediate needs at the Physician Health Program of BC, we would be quite disappointed if it turned out to be extremely difficult for other case management groups to understand how they could implement it to meet their own needs. So I've been spending quite a bit of thought energy trying to prevent this from happening.

We think we've solved a number of important issues that have arisen in other case management systems I've used, but certainly we haven't covered them all just yet. Also, we need to take what we've got and try it out a bit before we can understand the issues we might have created as we try to solve others. This is the joy of "Agile" or iterative development. We know we can't get ALL the specs 100% right the first time. We're ok with that.

One thing we're just starting to think about is a way to integrate all the externally developed standardized vocabularies that people need to associate with cases. We have a few that crop up in the case types we deal with, and other people will have entirely different ones. Right now we're looking at a way to suggest something for 2.3+ that might make integrating these vocabularies less cumbersome than it seems to be now in many instances.

Meanwhile, I'm just personally looking forward to getting my hands on the alpha release of CiviCRM 2.2, which will include CiviCase. It's going to be good!